Heroes in a modern world Ever wanted to be a Hero in modern life? Well at least you can play one with SCION:Hero.
This awesome and direct game is a kind of a new RPG material. In it you are described as a child of a God that has the potential to uncover its Legend in the world and save it from attacks of hidden mythic monsters. The book is full of powers, knacks, epic attributes, ideas, stunts, relics and cool ideas as how to develop your starting human into a full fledged Hero.
Imagine jumping several yads in a single hop, throwing sewer crates with ease, been the most beautiful (or dreadful) person in a Red Carpet Event, controlling the wind or breathing underwater, sustaining massive damage, saving people, commanding with your presence or voice, etc..
Definitely a MUST for the Hero-kind of players who want a quick system and a easy storytelling feel.
Find Your Destiny Scion: Hero is the first installment of the Scion series, to include Demi-God, God and soon to be released Companion and Ragnarok.
I'm going to break down the book by a few categories, feel free to use the headings to guide you, or read it all.
Presentation: The book is beautiful. The cover art and depiction of the deities is wonderful and illustrations throughout highlight scenes of gameplay and are generally entertaining. Very similiar to the new World of Darkness books.
Concept: The gods of old (Japanese, Aztec, Loa/Voodo, Greek/Roman, Egyptian, Norse) have been preparing for war with the recently escaped Titans whom they'd sealed away for thousands of years. In step with their preparations the gods of come to the material world to create children endowed with some of their god like power and the ability to transcend their own human limitations to god hood. These concepts should be pretty familiar to someone who has read American Gods by Neil Gaiman or who has played Exalted. Some of the other themes of the game include coming to terms with your divine heiritage, creating a legend for yourself as you grow in power, and the idea that fate has a purpose for all of the scions.
System: The system is -VERY- similar to the Exalted 2nd edition system. It is not terribly unlike the new WoD system and with a working knowledge of old or new world of darkness the game should be a breeze to pick up, combat works differently and the difficulties are set and different but otherwise it's very simliar. The combat system can slow things down a bit, but my group has never had any real complaints. I would recommend that your players (and you for NPCs) write down dice pools and page numbers to help speed things up. As you become more familiar with the ins and outs combat speeds up dramatically- sure it's probably still slower than D&D 3.5 but it's also epic and entertaining instead of the same old grind (IMO).
"Powers": This section is a quick snapshot of the cool abilities that Scions have. First, Scions get their powers from their ever growing Legend, which is both a trait and an expendable value of points. Legend allows players to fuel their powers and also add dice to rolls, reroll, or improve defense value (an armor class of sorts). Willpower works much like it does in other White Wolf systems, and virtues can also aid the character.
'Super powers' if you will are sort of divided among 3 areas. The first of which are boons. Boons are special powers relating to certain purviews (Sky, Earth, Death, Moon, etc) and at this phase the power's aren't PHENOMINAL but are very handy and if used by a clever player can make quite a difference.
Next are Knacks. Players get Epic Attributes (Herculean Strength for example) and in addition to getting bonuses for sheer strength, wits, charm etc they get super human knacks associated with the attribute.
Lastly are birthrights. These include animal companions (i.e. Pegasus), followers (spartan warriors), guides(obi-wan kenobi), and relics. Relics seemed the most interesting and most important. They have two ratings, one might improve the over all accuracy or damage of a weapon, while the other allows the Scion to channel purviews and use their boons. An example would be a katana that allows access to death and fire puriews that is also enhanced in accuracy and damage.
Here's a few quick guides as well If You've Played...
Dungeons and Dragons- this game will seem off because of the modern settings and in general White Wolf games allows for more creative and innovative playing (and story telling). Instead of just throwing fireball to wipe out a horde of enemies try collapsing the ceiling, instead of just attacking the game rewards you for being descriptive in your actions.
Exalted- Some people call Scion Exalted modern, which isn't too difficult to see. Instead of different parts of the solar system representing deities it's the gods of old (see above) and you won't be AS impressive to start with but it adds to the excitement.
World of Darkness- The system will be a bit different unless you have Exalted under your belt, but shouldn't take long to figure out. The game can easily catch the darker themes presented in WoD but can be more light hearted as well, playing to a more heroic crowd than sulking goths but that's not to say the game is all sunshine and rainbows- Scion can be a very dark game indeed.
In conclusion Scion is a great game with diverse attractions and easily correctable flaws. Pace of combat can be corrected with experience and attentiveness, extra Pantheons can be found as fan published materials on the scion wiki and story ideas can be drawn from numerous sources.
Superhero This book is a prologue from Scion Trilogy...
Different from any White-wolf games, Scion gives hope to achieve...
So, for a powergamer RPG pen n paper, Scion is a must play games...
Nice concept, poorly organized, highly overpriced Scion is like cable tv. In order to get what you want, you have to buy a package that contains a lot of stuff you don't want, don't need, will probably never use and which only serves to drive up the price of the total package. Ideally the Scion manuals would consist of a player's handbook, a separate Storyteller's guide, and maybe a softcover campaign pack. Unfortunately that's not how the Scion books are packaged. Instead all three of those elements are combined into a set of three books which are divided based on power level rather than target audience. What that means is that if you're a player, you've still got to buy all three books, with a combined list price of over $100, just to get the full 200-250 pages of information (100-150 pages from Scion: Hero and 50 pages each from Scion: Demigod and Scion: God) that players need. That's not very good value for your money. For Storytellers the situation is a little better. Most Storytellers will find about half of every book useful because they'll be getting an additional 200-250 pages of information aimed at helping them run an ongoing Scion campaign. Still not that good a value in my opinion.
So what about the other half of the content in the Scion books? Well, each book begins with around 40 pages of mediocre fiction that you'll probably read once, if you read it at all, and then never look at again. The rest is a mini-campaign. The inclusion of this campaign completely baffles me. Its like the folks at White Wolf don't understand how roleplaying groups work. While its customary for RPGs to include a few sample adventures that GMs and Storytellers can use as a basis for creating their own adventures, I've never seen anyone devote half of every game manual to a campaign and with good reason. First, there's absolutely no reason for anyone in the group to have a copy of the campaign except the Storyteller. Its a waste of money for every person in the group to buy a copy. Second, campaigns are one shot items. You use them once and then discard them because you really can't run your players through the same adventures over and over again. So who wants to buy a campaign packaged in an expensive hardcover format? Finally, this particular campaign assumes your players will want to use the characters provided instead of creating their own which is simply unrealistic. I've never seen players opt to play pre-generated characters unless the characters in question are popular figures from some favorite book, movie or television show which these aren't. What's really annoying about the campaign is that there's so much other material that White Wolf could have included in its place that would have been of more use to players and Storytellers alike. More Pantheons, more Purviews, more Boons at every level, guidelines for setting Scion campaigns in different time periods ranging from the distant past to the far future, and so on.
If you're a Storyteller, you'll want to buy all three of the Scion books. And be prepared to spend a lot of time flipping back and forth between books while you try to remember where a certain bit of information is located. If you're a player, I can really only recommend buy Scion: Hero. The other two books just don't contain enough player information to justify spending a lot of money on them.
Modern Epic Roleplaying Scion:Hero
Roleplaying games are facilitators of imagination. You immerse yourself in a charachter in a certain genre of fiction; from high fantasy, to post apocalyptic science fiction. This charachter is typically a protaganist in a story that unfolds in real time. Most people reading this probably know these basics...
When people think roleplaying they typically think Dungeons & Dragons. High fantasy that has roots in Tolkiens LOTR for it's various settings. But lately World of Darkness and White Wolf Studios are becoming just as much a common name, due to the settings of casting the role of the charachters as the typical antagonists. Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves...pulling from various sources they created there own genre of personal horror.
This is nothing like either. This is Scion.
The setting is contemp modern day. Your charachter is a son or daughter of a God or Goddess from Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Aztec, Voudoun, or Japanese cultures. They Gods have been busy away from the earth fighting the escaped Titans of Greek Myth fame. Your divine heritage drives you to the Heroes that the world has been lacking, as the fates pull you to where you are needed. With roots in the primal stories of the most evocative mythologies the stories this game allows you to create and take part in are intense.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
